FARSANG Interviews: Barnaby Rogerson

FARSANG spoke with Barnaby Rogerson, an author, historian and the head of Eland, a Publishers which specialises in rare travel writing. Eland celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Barnaby Rogerson at Eland Books HQ, London.

Eland Books sits on a rich seam of classical travel writing, hidden within enticing white and red-bordered books, often fronted with an evocative painting or black-and-white still. They can turn a rainy train journey through Southern England into a traipse on pack horses through the Karakorams or a wartime dinner with the Sicilian mafia. We spoke with Barnaby Rogerson to hear his perspective on travel, great travel writing and the story of Eland.

What is your earliest memory of travel? 

Holding onto my mother’s back, like a small frog, as she taught my elder brother and sister to swim in a rocky cove which became our private beach. My father was a navigating officer in the Royal Navy, serving in the Seventh Destroyer squadron.  I was too small to go to school, but many years later (when I had to leave Libya suddenly by ferry and we arrived at Malta) every scent, be it geraniums, sun-bleached limestone walls, the surf of the sea drying into crystals of salt, brought unconscious memories of this infancy back: complete with the sound of monastery bells and the lemon trees in the garden.   

Tell us a bit about Eland. How did you begin working there?

Eland was set up in 1982 by John Hatt, then working as a rep for Constables the Publishers. He was infuriated that none of the many publishers he had written to, begging them to reprint Norman Lewis’s book, A Dragon Apparent, had responded.  John Hatt had travelled a lot in South-East Asia and knew what an exceptional book it was, prescient about the mess that the USA would get in if they took over France’s role as the unwanted colonial power in Vietnam.  So he decided to set up for himself, added three other books to show that he was serious, and that is pretty much how Eland has continued.  At least four rediscovered classic travel books a year, which forty years later has led to Eland having the largest dedicated list of travel literature in the world.  

I wrote a fan letter as a student, and John Hatt was good enough to ask me around for tea, under the understanding it was not a job interview.  We stayed in touch over the years and was constantly suggesting books that he should reprint, which I had discovered whilst researching guide books that I wrote.  I then set up Sickle Moon Books, but as it was such a clone of Eland, I thought I had better write to John Hatt and warn him privately.  It turned out to be one of the best things I did, for he wrote back, suggesting I take Eland over, which I did twenty-five years ago.   I am a fast and efficient reader, but incompetent in handling anything more complicated than a bonfire, so fortunately my clever wife came on board the project.   

Eland’s books offer a window into places  - Yunnan, Baltistan, wartime Naples - which seem inaccessible. What’s the value of this in a world of city breaks and well-worn gap year routes?

Many travellers just want to see a place for themselves, and apart from wanting some tips about hotels, want to forge their own path.  We respect that. I have a sneaking suspicion that our core group of readers are not holidaymakers, but people who have worked abroad, and in some period of their life have experienced what it is like to be both inside a community and outside it.  

We can never second guess who our readers will be. During Covid I had the time to chat to many loyal readers (by e-mail as I responded to their book orders), and was delighted to find that they defy any class, ethnic or educational background. As you probably know half of the population of Britain never buys a book in any one year, and less than twenty per cent of the population read more than six paperbacks a year.  Readers have always been a wilful minority.  

Clockwise from left: Ronald Wright, Cut Stones and Crossroads: A Journey to the Two Worlds of Peru, Time Among the Maya: Travels in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico and On Fiji Islands. Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt: An Englishwoman on the Nile, 1862-69. Charles Nicholl, Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma and Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91. Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters. Bruce Wannell, Tales from the life.

Eland’s travel books can overlap into autobiography, contain anthropological detail more pertinent than the most contemporary academia and foreground new historical perspectives. What do you look for when reviewing potential titles?

‘Travel’ has always embraced a very wide horizon of writing – adventure, memoir, history, exploration and anthropology – but we have found that the single distinguishing feature of great travel books is that the reader must relish the company of the writer.  I would suggest that humour, self-deprecation, wit, energy, bravery, sensuality and honesty are vital elements, but it cannot be a formula, it has to be personal and real.  The author also needs to be able to construct a narrative and know what to abandon.  A journal like diary of a journey is seldom a travel book, for as one of our writers explained to us, if your memory is not vivid enough, why write about it?  

I have explored all sorts of odd corners of North Africa and the Middle East over the last forty years, but hold it is an absolute standard that I want to read about things that I could not do.  I wish writers to remain heroic in their aspiration as well as their craft.  As the world becomes ever easier to travel in, we must demand more from our travel writers - learning the language, earning the locals trust and staying still long enough, to really understand a community, to tell their story with empathy and energy.  

Do you think Eland will ever move to publishing contemporary travel writing?

We did try our hand a decade ago and had great fun publishing over a dozen brand new books.  But it is a curiously different business model, you need to have more permanent and dedicated staff, working consistently on the ever-evolving platforms of publicity and the marketing of books.  We had a good run for our money, but also learned that a backlist has many advantages.  We are well stocked by the shops that know us, whilst a new book has its moment in the sun but after a while will get returned to the warehouse.  Print runs for a new book have to be an inspired guess, whilst after forty years in the business of running a backlist, we are more confident about this small but vital decisions.  

Many today consume travel-related content through social media, streaming sites and television. What do Eland’s books offer that these kinds of media often can’t? 

Our books offer an immeasurably bigger horizon and a much more intense journey of discovery which will stay in your mind for the rest of your life. I have worked on television documentaries, and we happily run all sorts of media streams, so I do not knock any of these ways of introducing interesting ideas to the broadest possible public, but for me, they are all there to ultimately challenge you to take up the big, deep commitment, the book.  

Clockwise from top left: E.M. Forster, The Hill of Devi: An Englishman serving at the Court of a Maharaja. Guy Kennaway, One People. Francis Yeats Brown, Bengal Lancer. Jéróme and Jean Tharaud, A Moroccan Trilogy: Marrakesh, Rabat and Fes. Veronica Doubleday, Three Women of Herat: Afghanistan, 1973-77. Ralph and Molly Izzard, Smelling the Breezes: A Journey through the High Lebanon in 1957.

Do you have a favourite work or writer? 

I am currently packing up an entire Eland library of 150 books, which we now and then sell to our customers through our website: www.travelbooks.co.uk.  What with the bubble wrap and the packaging it now fills up five large brown cardboard boxes, I still get a tingle of pleasure, imagining these books (each of the so exceptional and so very, very different) going off to a live reader.  Now and then, a customer rings up, wanting our advice about what might suit a godchild or a sister-in-law.  Our sure-fire starter list for someone new to travel writing, would have to include Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another, Norman Lewis’s Naples 44, Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World and Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt.  

Finally, are there any areas which you feel deserve more coverage?

One of the most silent and overlooked communities is the British working class, which have been silenced for centuries by the dazzling chatter of our great novelists and brilliant historians.  We strive to find books that testify to this other experience of life, but they are rare, and frankly tend to sell very slowly.  But do have a look at Tony Parker’s People of Providence, to see what a proper writer can do, in giving people a voice. 

A list and short description of the recommended reading from Eland can be found on our ‘Farsang Recommends’ page